This is not the actual sales script. It's a script for the so-called canvassing call. Or so it was called back when I worked in boiler rooms cca. 2007. You hire a bunch of losers pay them no wage and all they do is telemarketing "can I call you with an opportunity?" i.e. you simply pre-qualify people for the real call. You show off some fake credibility, present yourself like a real business and says stuff like 'we only send couple of trade recommendations a year'. Then a week later the real sales guy give the prospect a hyped up call about this once in a lifetime opportunity.
Most people, about 95% making these first calls never make it higher. Either they quickly gather this job is a BS scam or they're too stupid to realize that and that stupidity often prevents them from going higher up. A few cynical ones like the manipulative aspects of it.
The job of a firm is to create illusion of excessive wealth and rockstar lifestyle of these "brokers" (strippers, cocaine, etc.) to attract some kind of talent. Most of the directors are faking the size of their wealth. E.g. coming to job on rented Bentley. They also lie about the nature of the job to hire people for "canvassing" as it doesn't matter how long you stay, if you only deliver 20 leads per first day and quit that's still a win. A bulk of the leads come from people who were tricked into the job and quit asap.
Most people who make it through are the ones cynical enough to stay around, then they harvest work of the ones who quit earlier. E.g. you collect leads, small clients etc. I have a friend who made it far, his lifestyle was just like Wolf of Wallstreet but more excessive. That movie btw. it's watered down - which is hard to believe for most as you'd expect Hollywood to overblow things.
There's telesales and telemarketing. In sales you close deals which requires skills. There's very few actual sales people in the market today, most just end up in this role because they can't get another job and then simply do manual marketing (adding people on linkedin, sending out cold emails, talking to non decision makers). Some are lucky to work in a company with great product and even there I see them slow down momentum. In fact I've seen a few startups miss their chance because they hired fake sales people early on.
Er, that distinction isn’t quite right. In any B2B enterprise company, there are SDRs (Sales Development Representatives) and AEs (Account Executives).
AEs are the sales people. They’re the ones who close the deals.
SDRs pretty much do nothing but qualify. If they close a deal, great, but sometimes that’s not even a good thing because it possibly could have been a bigger deal, if they had the AE script/training. But if they do well at qualifying as an SDR, they can often move up to AE, and so on.
But yes, SDRs are generally folks straight out of college or switching careers. It requires no prior knowledge, just the audacity and ability to cold call someone and be charismatic and personable enough to get them past the qualifying questions and hopefully schedule a follow up call.
You may be thinking of ISRs (Inside Sales Representatives) which are effectively SDRs who are authorized (and trained) to close very small deals, as compared to the AEs.
This actually requires a different set of skills, as AEs are often speaking to people in a “board room,” literally or figuratively, and sales cycles are long, meaning the contracts have to be huge to make it worth it (plus good AEs are expensive).
ISR sales can’t be long, as volume matters more than absolute price for inside sales, since that absolute price is orders of magnitude lower than an enterprise sale. As a result, the amount of time spent on each candidate customer has to be an order of magnitude lower as well, so qualifying a customer out of the top of the funnel is more important than almost anything else. The biggest waste of time is spending hours or weeks with a customer who was never going to buy in the first place, and novice sales people make that mistake all the time.
So yeah, I’m not sure what distinction you were trying to make between “telesales” and “telemarketing,” but that distinction really doesn’t exist.
Aside: literally every single startup hires bad sales people early on. Every single one. I have never seen one that doesn’t. It is, in my estimation, impossible to know what to look for in the right sales person until you’ve made a bunch of sales, which is why it’s so important for founders to make the first bunch of sales. But founders are a wholly different breed from sales people, and reading sales people is exceptionally hard.
For ISRs and SDRs, the solution is easy: hire them, train them, see if they perform, and fire them if they don’t and reward them if they do. Because SDRs and ISRs are so cheap, relatively speaking, as it’s an entry-level role, it’s a fairly low risk as long as you’re actually willing to put in the effort to train them and cut your losses when they’re not working out.
AEs are harder because their base is generally much higher, but they should come with a prepped “Rolodex”, ready to close deals quickly. If you don’t have a pipeline, solve that problem first.
Sorry for the rant, but seemed important.
Source: I’m a serial founder, have run sales teams, some successful and others not. I’m an engineer who happens to be good at sales, but finding good sales people is still a dark art.
OK seems like things changed a bit. Back in the day AE was someone who would work in lower level, less aggressive sales (fewer deals, bigger size) doing a mix of business dev and customer support - or it would be companies trying to add "manager" to the job title back when word manager carried some weight. Been talking from my own experience from basically 15-18 years ago from London and Europe.
Most people, about 95% making these first calls never make it higher. Either they quickly gather this job is a BS scam or they're too stupid to realize that and that stupidity often prevents them from going higher up. A few cynical ones like the manipulative aspects of it.
The job of a firm is to create illusion of excessive wealth and rockstar lifestyle of these "brokers" (strippers, cocaine, etc.) to attract some kind of talent. Most of the directors are faking the size of their wealth. E.g. coming to job on rented Bentley. They also lie about the nature of the job to hire people for "canvassing" as it doesn't matter how long you stay, if you only deliver 20 leads per first day and quit that's still a win. A bulk of the leads come from people who were tricked into the job and quit asap.
Most people who make it through are the ones cynical enough to stay around, then they harvest work of the ones who quit earlier. E.g. you collect leads, small clients etc. I have a friend who made it far, his lifestyle was just like Wolf of Wallstreet but more excessive. That movie btw. it's watered down - which is hard to believe for most as you'd expect Hollywood to overblow things.